The Supreme Court Cited Timothy McVeigh As An Example Of Why New Inmate Strip Searches Are Needed

Buried in the middle of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's opinion
rejecting a limit on strip searches of new inmates is this
sentence:

"Hours after the Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh was
stopped by a state trooper who noticed he was driving without a
license plate."

It was the most striking example of why Kennedy and the Supreme
Court's four other Conservative-minded judges voted in a 5-4
opinion to place no limits on what civil liberties groups
considered invasive strip searches on new inmates.

Writing the majority opinion, Kennedy
considered it "unworkable" to enforce different standards for
different kinds of criminals because the purported seriousness of
the offense does not correlate with whether that person is a
violent or dangerous criminal.

"The record provides evidence that the seriousness of
an offense is a poor predictor of who has contraband and
that it would be difficult in practice to determine
whether individual detainees fall within the proposed
exemption," Kennedy wrote.

The case, Florence vs. Board of Chosen Freeholders of
Burlington County, was the challenge of a New Jersey man that had
been arrested for a fine after a highway stop and held in jail
for six days. He was released after he displayed that the fine
had already been paid, because of a mistake in state records.
Upon entering the jail, he was strip-searched twice, something
for which he sued for a violation of privacy.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote the dissenting opinion, concurred
by -- surprise! -- the rest of the court's liberals.

He wrote, in part: "A strip search that involves a stranger
peering without consent at a naked individual, and in
particular at the most private portions of that person’s
body, is a serious invasion of privacy."